Love or hate his movies, there’s probably at least one David Cronenberg scene lodged in your mind.

Whether it’s the coarse hairs (ugh!) growing out of Jeff Goldblum’s back in The Fly, giant bugs (yuck!) in Naked Lunch or James Woods sticking his hand in his stomach (see ya later) in Videodrome, there’s likely something Cronenbergian in every movie fan’s library of mental images.

But if the Toronto director’s name has become synonymous in popular culture with something that is particularly gruesome and squelchy, he is far more than just a master of the macabre. This is obvious in more recent movies like the tightly plotted thriller Eastern Promises, the period drama A Dangerous Method and in the contemporary satire Cosmopolis. It’s even obvious in his early work — one of his first movies was a drag race flick called Fast Company (to this day, still probably the only drag-race movie ever made in Edmonton).

And it will be especially obvious in From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg. The retrospective, at Cinematheque April 3-13, 17-30 and May 2 includes 20 features and four short films.

In fact, the 71-year-old director came to horror almost by accident — his background was in science (he was in the Honours Science program at the University of Toronto until he switched to the Honours English Language and Literature program) and science fiction.

“When I started to make movies, I had no idea what I was going to do,” Cronenberg said recently in a phone interview from his Toronto home. “I thought I was going to be a novelist, I didn’t think I would be a filmmaker.”

Shivers (a.k.a. They Came Within), his first commercial (albeit low-budget) feature, could just as easily have been a family drama, he says.

Instead, what came out was a movie about a parasite that terrorizes residents of an apartment building outside of Montreal. It was the first in a long line of the kind of the so-called “body horror” movies he became known for.

Readers should keep in mind that at the time, not only was the Canadian film industry nonexistent, but that making a horror movie in this country was not exactly a one-way ticket to glory, or even a second shot at making a film.

“Since then, it’s been accepted that one of the best ways to break into filmmaking is through horror or sci-fi,” he said. “But at the time I was doing it, it was the worst thing you could do in Canada. There was no tradition of genre filmmaking in Canada at all. It took awhile before it settled in, that yes, it was a legitimate thing to do.”

As a filmmaker who deals in controversial subjects, as well as sex and violence, Cronenberg has had his run-ins with censors. The Ontario Censor Board — “They didn’t hide it, they called themselves the Ontario Censor Board,” he noted — demanded cuts to his fourth feature, The Brood.

“Things are a little looser now,” he said. “What people find acceptable is very different. There was a time when you could not show a decapitation on film, no matter what the context was. Now you see them regularly.”

Despite censorship, working within a film industry still in its infancy, and his growing international acclaim, Cronenberg resisted the pull of Hollywood.

“There was a moment when I thought I might have to move to L.A. to make movies,” he said. “But eventually Telefilm Canada — well, its predecessor, the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and Cinepix, which was the only company making feature films in Canada at the time — allowed me to stay in Canada. Government funding and an adventurous private company combined to create a film industry in Canada, and I was the beneficiary of that. Others, who say they’ve been inspired by my example, like Atom Egoyan, have managed to do the same thing. We can make films anywhere. But it’s true, I was pretty much the first to be able to do that.”

Cronenberg’s literary background — studying English lit in university, followed by a stab at writing a novel (abandoned) — served him well in the beginning, when he was forming his vision and style, and writing his own scripts. But as he became more confident as a filmmaker, he was able to abandon a certain amount of control.

“I was very happy with The Dead Zone, and I didn’t write the script and I didn’t write the book it was based on, and I realized that to mix your creative blood with somebody else’s was actually a terrific thing to do. You produce something quite new that neither one of you could have made on your own.”

Since that 1983 movie, from a Stephen King novel, Cronenberg has made films based on the work and life of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), plays (M. Butterfly and A Dangerous Method), and a graphic novel (A History of Violence), along with other books (Crash, Spider and Cosmopolis to name a few).

His next movie is called Maps to the Stars and is based on a script by Bruce Wagner, an L.A.-based writer known for his scathing novels about Hollywood.

If that doesn’t sound very Cronenbergian, fear not, fans of sex and disease (two favourite Cronenberg themes). This fall brings publication of Consumed, his first novel, and it promises healthy doses of both.

“There were some screenplay pages that I showed to the potential publishers, but at that point it started to become a novel,” he said. “For me, I really wanted the full literary novel experience, not something that would be the basis for a movie. Just like when I directed The Fly opera (based on his 1986 film), people thought I would do lots of video projections. But I wanted to deal with theatre and see how that works. It’s the same for Consumed. It’s a literary event for me, and not a movie one.”

Did he have any problem with the sex scenes, which can be notoriously hard to write — as acknowledged by the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards?

“As far as sex scenes go, yeah, there’s a lot of sex in it. What people mean may be that it’s difficult to write a good sex scene. We’ll see if I win an award for bad sex writing. It’s hard to say. As with directing sex scenes in movies, which I’ve never found to be particularly difficult, I didn’t have any trouble writing those scenes at all.”

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From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg reveals myriad sides of Canadian director

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